The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry has experienced rapid growth. Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs where each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. The scaling of IC techniques to nanometer regime has increased power dissipation. The increased power dissipation causes several problems including reducing battery life in mobile systems, expensive packaging and cooling solutions and can also result in chip failures. Of the various components contributing to power dissipation, leakage or static power dissipation is growing very fast and is predicted to exceed dynamic power dissipation in the near future.
In another aspect, various devices have been proposed for providing special functions. For example, diffused metal-gate-oxide semiconductor (DMOS) transistors have been proposed for high voltage operations. To integrate the DMOS transistors with conventional bipolar-CMOS transistors, a process named bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) process has been developed.